There is an objective difference between one who has knowledge of
something and one who does not. This is true in both the occurrent and the
dispositional senses of "knowledge" and "knows." That is,
whether or not X has knowledge on a certain point or about a certain
matter--knows the English alphabet, for example, the narrative content of War
and Peace, or the date of Robert Kennedy's assassination--is not a matter of
how anyone, including X himself, may think or feel about X and his
conscious or other states.

Knowledge with reference to specific matters is a condition which individual
human beings are or are not in. Usually this condition is found in a social
context. But if only one person existed it would still be possible for that
person to be knowledgeable about some, at least, of the specific matters that
concerned him--for example, about reliable sources of food and water in his
environment.

Can this objective difference among human beings consist in properties and
relations that fit within a naturalist ontology?

A long tradition of ancient and modern philosophers from Plato, Descartes and
Kant to T. H. Green, Edmund Husserl and Hilary Putnam has insisted that it
cannot. Others--especially those in the 19th and 20th centuries who insisted
upon distinguishing Naturalism from Materialism--have held that it could be. But
with the rise and development of the mind/brain identity thesis during the last
half of the 20th century, the generous naturalism (as we shall call it)
of Dewey, Santayana, Sidney Hook and others has largely disappeared in favor of
a narrower naturalism more commonly and more correctly called "Physicalism"
(the older "Materialism"). For it, all distinctively human properties
are reduced to strictly physical properties of the central nervous system of the
human body or to these plus characteristics of the natural and social
setting--or, to nothing at all.1

In this paper I will try to explain why narrower Naturalism or unqualified
Physicalism cannot find a place for knowledge, and specifically for three of its
essential components: truth, logical relations and noetic unity. At this late
date it is hard to say much that will be strictly new on these matters, but,
apparently, there is much that needs to be said again. What I shall say about
truth and logic is practically identical with what Frege said more than a
century ago, though I hold views significantly different from his on how truth
and logic fit into the full context of knowing and knowledge.2
What I shall say about noetic unity adds little to what has already been said by
Kant, Lotze and Husserl.

Naturalism is...What?

Before the question about the narrower Naturalism's ability to accommodate
knowledge within its permissible categories can be raised, one has to come to
some understanding of what Naturalism and knowledge are, and this
is difficult to do without begging important questions.

In traditional philosophical terms, Naturalism is a form of Monism. It holds,
in some order of interdependence, that reality, knowledge and method each are of
only one basic kind. That is, there are not two radically different kinds of
reality or knowledge or method. It is fundamentally opposed to Pluralism, and
most importantly to Dualism as traditionally understood (Plato, Descartes,
Kant).

In its modern forms, Naturalism further specifies its Monism by reference to
the empirical or the sense perceptible. The one type of reality admitted by it
is that of the sense-perceptible world and its constituents. All knowledge is,
for it, reducible to (or in some manner continuous with) sense perception, and
all inquiry essentially involves sense perception, directly or indirectly.
Currently, "the sense perceptible" is de-emphasized in favor of
"the scientific"--the organization of data around empirically
underdetermined hypotheses. But this is understood to constitute empirical
research and, hopefully, to yield empirical or descriptive
knowledge.

This leads directly into the current versions of "naturalized
epistemology," where the emphasis is entirely upon the human being as a
strictly physical organism acquiring beliefs in its "natural"
environment. The question as to whether Naturalism can accommodate knowing and
knowledge is then replaced by the question of whether the various normative
issues that arise with reference to knowledge and belief formation in the course
of human life and scientific endeavors can be replaced by mere descriptions
of actual processes of belief formation. In the famous words of Quine:
"Epistemology still goes on, though in a new setting and a clarified status.
Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of
psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz.,
a physical human subject."3

Knowledge itself,then--and, more weakly, justified belief--is simply belief
that is produced in a certain way, for example, in ways that are reliable,
ways that tend to produce true beliefs in actual as well as counterfactual
situations that are relevant alternatives to the actual situation.4
Quine and others hold that epistemology can be appropriately replaced by
psychology. This would yield what is now widely referred to as a
"naturalized epistemology." Hilary Putnam, Jaegwon Kim and others
hold, by contrast, that the normative (non-descriptive) element cannot be
eliminated from epistemology, and therefore that a naturalized epistemology is impossible.5

All of this is now very familiar. But there are problems: problems which
indicate to me, as it has to others, that the issue of the naturalization of
knowledge is misconceived when stated in this way. And first of all, if we are
going to replace epistemology with psychology we will have to decide which
psychology will do. In fact, there is no existing psychology for the
Naturalistic viewpoint to turn to. There is only an idealization of some
adequate theory of human behavior which, supposedly, might at some time be
achieved. This will, of course, have to be a "scientific" psychology.
But what would that amount to? Could it possibly be a psychology that is not
essentially identified in terms of Naturalism itself? Highly unlikely. But then
we are running in a circle, specifying Naturalism in terms of psychology, but
then... a naturalized psychology.

At present there are many socially identifiable, institutionalized forms of
"psychology," with associated professional organizations, funding
sources and avenues of publication. Research universities in the United States
rarely ever have only one academic department giving advance degrees in
psychology. So, when the naturalized epistemologist speaks of replacing
epistemology with psychology, which department will he go to?

And we might also have second thoughts about normativity being the
issue for the naturalization of epistemology. It is, of course, an issue.
It is hard to imagine that the only epistemological question to be raised with
respect to belief is its occurrence--even occurrence under certain conditions,
no matter how fine-tuned those conditions may be. We would still want to know if
our belief is "true," "correct," "right." Putnam
asks: "Why should we expend our mental energy in convincing ourselves that
we aren't thinkers, that our thoughts aren't really about anything,
noumenal or phenomenal, that there is no sense in which any
thought is right or wrong (including the thought that no thought
is right or wrong) beyond being the verdict of the moment , and so on? This is a self-refuting enterprise if there ever was one!"6

But let us surrender the point for a moment and grant that epistemology can
be replaced by psychology, the normative by the descriptive. Will it make any
difference with respect to the longstanding issues around the naturalization of
knowledge? Not really. The descriptive/normative contrast has no essential
bearing upon the issue of Naturalism in epistemology. Getting rid of normativity
will not secure the naturalization of epistemology and retaining it will not
exclude naturalization. It has seemed to do so only because an important
philosopher (Quine) in an influential paper set that contrast up as the
essential issue, and others, for whatever reasons, accepted his formulation as
the framework of the debate.

On the one hand, a hardy Naturalist such as Dewey might very well insist that
there is nothing non-natural about normativity.7
To think so is only to admit another of what Dewey often called "untenable
dualisms." Norms are interwoven throughout human experience and are every
bit as "natural" as anything else to be found there. And a
Wittgensteinian reading of linguistic rules and forms of life could come up with
much the same point. Only someone who reads "descriptive" (as opposed
to normative) in a strongly materialistic or physicalistic fashion would take
the opposition of normative to descriptive to be the issue of naturalism in
epistemology. But many Naturalists have not taken "descriptive" in any
such sense, and certainly science or experimental method does not of itself
require them to do so. What, exactly, is so unnatural or non-natural about
norms?

On the other hand, let's suppose we surrender norms--just banish
"right" in both its adverbial and its noun forms from our treatment of
knowledge and justified belief. What is so "naturalistic" about mere
description? A description will be naturalistic only if what it is about--its
content, what it mentions--fits into a naturalistic ontology. The issue
for Naturalism certainly is not just about normativity. What, for
example, would make one think that an adequate description of the formation of
belief by means of a reliable process would mention only things that would fit
into a naturalistic ontology? Only, I suggest, the prior assumption that the
"science" of psychology will, when fully perfected, be appropriately
natural--that it will "emerge" from biology as biology from chemistry
and chemistry from physics, or something like that. Or, at least, that it will
mention nothing "dualistic" or "transcendental" with regard
to the physical world.

And this does not even raise the issue of whether or not description as such
can be understood in naturalistic terms, or whether describing itself is an
entirely natural event or fact. A fully naturalized semantics is, once again,
just presupposed in the move to "description" without norms. But
wouldn't the description (of reliable processes of belief formation, etc.)
itself have to be "correct," "right," "adequate,"
"justified"? And have we then gotten rid of norms if we simply do not
mention them in our descriptions of epistemic processes?

I presume that the age-old discussions in ethical theory pitting Intuitionism
and Naturalism against each other (coming into the late 20th Century through the
ethical Intuitionism of G. E. Moore and developing in the subsequent critique of
"descriptivism" by ethical theorists practicing "linguistic
analysis") must have influenced Quine to frame the issue of naturalizing
epistemology in the way he did. But his was a clearly unfortunate choice so far
as genuine philosophical progress is concerned.

Invoking 'Science'

What has just been said with reference to psychology and naturalized
epistemology calls attention to broader issues bearing upon the specification of
Naturalism.

Methodological monism is an enduring aspect of generic Naturalism, and modern
Naturalism is often specified simply in terms of an exclusive application of
scientific method in all inquiries. But how can this method support claims about
the nature of reality as whole. For example, one might state that the only
realities are atoms (quarks, strings, etc.) and derivatives thereof. But how is
he to support his claim? It certainly cannot be derived from any specific
science (physics, chemistry on up) or from any conjunction of specific sciences.
And it is not to be derived through any application of experimental techniques
within any science.

The Naturalist must then have recourse to that popular but philosophically
suspect abstraction, 'science' itself, which says even less than the individual
sciences about the nature of reality as a whole, because says nothing at all. It
isn't the kind of thing that can say anything, though many
individuals--usually, I think, not themselves scientists, and certainly not
scientists expressing truths within the competence of their profession--present
themselves as speaking for science, and thus as being 'scientific' in
some extended but still authoritative sense.

John Searle seems to be in this position. He speaks of "our scientific
view of the world," which according to him every informed person with her
wits about her now believes to be true. He speaks of a view of the world
which includes "all of our generally accepted theories about what sort of
place the universe is and how it works."8
"It includes," he continues, "theories ranging from quantum
mechanics and relativity theory to the plate tectonic theory of geology and the
DNA theory of hereditary transmission," etc. We might imagine a very long
conjunctive sentence--containing the specific theories he has in mind as
conjuncts--that would, supposedly, express the "world view" in
question.

But this will hardly do what he wants. One thing that will not show up in
such a conjunctive sentence is any claim about reality as a whole or
knowledge in general. Such specific scientific theories as those just
mentioned--and no matter how many of them we may list--cannot provide an
ontology. They never even attempt to determine what it is to exist or what
existence is, and cannot by the nature of their content provide an exhaustive
list of what ultimate sorts of things there are. Their existential claims are
always restricted to specific types of entities as indicated in their basic
concepts.

We emphasize the point that to suppose that a given scientific theory or
conjunction of such theories provides an ontology constitutes a logical
mistake, a misreading of what the theories say and imply. Those theories, and
the bodies of knowledge wherein they are situated, actually say nothing
whatsoever about the universe or about how it--the whole
'thing'--works. This is a merely semantical point about the meaning or logical
content of the claims or sentences that make up the sciences. It is to be
established or refuted by examining, precisely, those claims and sentences. It
turns out that they do not even mention the universe, the totality of all
that exists, nor do they say anything about the boundaries of knowledge
generally. Such matters simply do not fall within the purview of their methods
or findings.

In support of this claim we ask: Could one possibly find the place in some
comprehensive and duly accredited scientific text or treatment, or some
technical paper, where it is demonstrated or necessarily assumed by the science
concerned that all that exists consists of particles or fields or
strings--or whatever the proper subject matter of the science is? Would Searle
or anyone else be able to mention the name of the physicist who established this
as an "obvious fact of physics"?9
Exactly where in the "atomic theory of matter" is the claim about what
"the universe consists entirely of" to be found?

"After all," Searle rhetorically asks, "do we not know from
the discoveries of science that there is really
nothing in the universe but physical particles and fields of forces acting on
physical particles?" The answer, contrary to his assumption, is "No,
we do not." Again, could he possibly just point out when, where, how
and by whom this "discovery of science" was made. Was it made?

Also, before the philosopher can use "the discoveries of science"
he must determine what "science" says. But this is to reify science,
to treat it as an entity that issues "results." Science, as already
indicated, says nothing at all. Particular scientists do. Unfortunately they
also make unscientific statements. How can we tell when an individual scientist
is making scientific statements, and "science" is therefore speaking,
and when they are not? And can a 'scientific' statement be false or perhaps
illicitly derived and still be scientific?

If a scientific statement can be false or based on logical errors, then a
scientific statement may be less than knowledge. How, then, could it be required
that we accept such statements as a basis or framework for philosophical work?
History shows that statements accepted as "scientific" have been both
false and based on logical errors. Is the advocate of Naturalism then one who
works under an authority that may be and has been wrong? He himself would rarely
if ever have the competence to do the scientific work and therefore must be
taking the statements of "science" on authority. But blind authority
is in fact one of the things we would expect Naturalism to stand against.
Historically it has done so, and that has been one of its virtues. How can it
avoid resting on it, however, if what Searle says is true? And is a
philosopher's statement about science, a scientific theory or scientist to be
automatically regarded as itself scientific? What can its status be?

The Dilemma of Naturalism

Naturalism staggers back and forth between physicalism (materialism) as a
general ontology and first philosophy, and outright physics-ism or scientism
(which need not take the form of physics-ism)--often, though not always, trying
to derive physics-ism from scientism and then physicalism from physics-ism. This
continues up to the present.

In a recent review Patricia Kitcher chides Stephen Stich for
"philosophical Puritanism" when he takes Naturalism to hold that the
only real entities are physical.10
Such a position apparently has now led Stich to give up Naturalism "in
favor of an open-ended pluralism." Pluralism, as he takes it, is a position
that counts as legitimate all properties "invoked in successful scientific
theories." But for Kitcher, it seems, such "Pluralism," tied to
"successful science," is just the Naturalism we want. She points out
how "the obvious authorities" on naturalistic epistemology (Quine,
Goldman) counsel us to "make free use of empirical psychology" and to
"reunite epistemology with psychology."11
Forget physicalism, her point seems to be. A loose scientism is enough to secure
Naturalism for us. Indeed, many of the "generous" Naturalists of the
mid-20th century gathered around Dewey and Sidney Hook (See footnote #1)
identified Naturalism precisely with acceptance of science and only science as
the arbiter of truth and reality, and seemed, at least, to accept whatever came
out of the pipe of "scientific inquiry" as knowledge and reality.

But if the points made above about science, even "successful
science," and about psychology in particular, are true, Kitcher's
advice--similar to the advice of a Dewey or Hook--simply cannot be followed. It
is vacuous in practice, for there is no way of identifying and accessing the
"successful science" which is proposed as defining Naturalism. At most
you get "science now," which is really only "some scientist(s)
now." And certainly no science (including psychology) that was not
Naturalistic in some strongly physicalistic or at least Empiricist sense would
be accepted as "successful" by those inclined to Naturalism. Then we
are back in the circle: Naturalism in terms of science--but, of course,
naturalistic science.

For these reasons I take it that the appeal to science cannot serve to
specify naturalism. There are, then, good reasons to be a "Puritan" if
you want to advocate Naturalism. Naturalism has to be an honest metaphysics; and
that metaphysics has to be "unqualified physicalism" as referred to
above. But then a thinker who would be naturalist would feel pressure to have
recourse to some specific apriori analyses to render his ontological
specification of Naturalism plausible. Short of that one simply can find no
reason why naturalistic monism with respect to reality, knowledge or method
should be true: no reason why there should not be radically different kinds of
realities with correspondingly radically different kinds of knowledge and
inquiry. Why should sciences be "unified"? This lack of reason is, I
think, what made A. E. Murphy conclude long ago, in his review of Naturalism
and the Human Spirit, "that the naturalists, who have so much that is
good to offer, still lack and need a philosophy...."12

In addition to the difficulty of coming up with such apriori analyses,
however, to turn to such inquiry as might produce them would be to break with
the epistemological monism essential to Naturalism and introduce something like
a "first philosophy." This would be discontinuous with the empirical
methods of the sciences. In showing its right through apriori analysis,
Naturalism would simply give up the game.

In specifying what Naturalism is, therefore, one seems to be faced with an
inescapable dilemma. Either one must turn to apriori (non-empirical) analyses to
establish its monism, which will refute Naturalism's basic claim about knowledge
and inquiry, or its claim will have to rest upon a vacuous appeal to
"science."

That might seem to end the discussion about Naturalism as a philosophical
alternative. But there may be a way to keep it going. One could retreat to a
mere methodological Naturalism and say that scientific method is our only
hope as human beings. Whether or not we can adequately specify Naturalism or
know it to be true, one might say, the "scientific method" must be
exclusively followed for human well being. Naturalism would then be a humane proposal,
not a philosophical claim. The proposal would be to assume in our inquiries
that only the physical (or the empirical) exists and to see if inquiry based
upon that assumption is not more successful in promoting human ends than any
other type of inquiry.13 Our task
here would then be to show that the methodological assumption proposed
contradicts what knowledge itself is, and to insist that it therefore cannot be
an adequate methodological assumption, since it will not allow us to understand
knowledge itself.

And Knowledge is...What?

But now what about knowledge? I take knowledge in the dispositional sense to
be identical with the capacity to represent a respective subject matter as it
is, on an appropriate basis of thought and/or experience. In the occurrent
sense it consists in actually representing, at a point in time, the
respective subject matter as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and/or
experience. This is not intended as an analysis or definition of knowledge, but
as an initial description of cases which count as knowledge or knowing.

What constitutes an "appropriate basis" will vary from subject
matter to subject matter, of course, as is generally acknowledged of the
corresponding methods of inquiry. It is, no doubt, impossible to define
"appropriate basis" in any perfectly general way, or even to specify
perfectly general necessary and sufficient conditions for having an appropriate
basis. Certainly I will make no attempt to do so here. However, a few things may
be said about the necessary conditions of knowledge and knowing, without
intending to be definitional or even comprehensive. The challenge to the
narrower Naturalism will be to accommodate these necessary conditions. If it
cannot do so it must be false, though it might still offer itself as a
heuristic principle of inquiry.

Clearly one necessary condition of knowledge, both in the occurrent and
dispositional senses, is truth. This is a necessary component of representing
anything as it is. But this necessary element in any sufficient condition of
knowing rules out all known psychologistic or sociological analyses of
knowledge, such as certainty, rational acceptability, warranted assertability,
reliability of process, etc., all of which apparently could be satisfied
in conjunction with representations and beliefs that are false. Could, that is,
unless truth is simply defined in terms of such psychological or
sociological conditions. (Of course certainty, warranted assertability and the
like each have psychological and other interests in their own right.)

We should also note that logical relations will be essentially involved in
any case of knowing. That perhaps should be expected because of their intimate
association with truth. To know one must think, in the sense of actively
exploring the logical interrelationships involved in and with the respective
representations. This is merely to say that the subject matter in question must
be reflectively and thoroughly conceptualized, and the logical relations between
relevant propositions and experiences carefully examined. Knowledge,
accordingly, does not simply happen to a person. It is not a passion.

Finally, in order to know one must have a certain broad familiarity with the
subject matter itself--have observed it, tested it, informed oneself, thought it
through--in ways suited to the kind of subject matter in question. How and to
what extent this can and must be done will be determined by the relevant process
of conceptualization of the subject matter (and of course by the subject matter
itself), which will go hand in hand with observation and experimentation. All of
this will produce a certain unity of consciousness that is necessary for there
to be knowledge. Knowledge does not come in discrete units. Noetic unity across
a complex field of consciousness within one person is required.

The absence of any reference to belief in my statements on knowledge
and knowing will be immediately noticed. The absence is intended, and though
rare today in discussions of knowledge it is by no means unique in the history
of the theory of knowledge.14
Even such a resolute Naturalist as Roy Wood Sellars specifies the nature of
knowledge without reference to belief.15

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such
(the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe
where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what
you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as
"justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous
others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is
something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even
knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may
actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

Whether or not one believes what one represents truly and has an appropriate
basis for so representing, depends on factors that are irrelevant to truth,
understanding and evidence. It depends, one might simply say, on how rational
one is. Now I do not think that this point about belief in relation to knowledge
is essential to the rest of this paper, but I mention it to indicate that the
absence of any reference to belief in my general description of knowledge is not
an oversight. Belief is not, I think, a necessary component of knowledge, though
one would like to believe that knowledge would have some influence upon belief,
and no doubt it often does.

In addition, it seems to me that specification of knowledge in terms of
belief is a harmfully tendentious characterization, favoring the naturalization
of knowledge. This is because belief has an essential tie to action, and is
therefore easily located in the natural world--say as a mere tendency of the
physical organism to behave in certain ways. I suspect that it is the almost
overwhelming Empiricist--and in that sense Naturalist--tendency of thought in
our time that has created the general presumption that knowledge must be some
kind of belief. Hence we must here at least question that presumption; and, I
believe, when questioned it will not prove to be obvious or, finally,
sustainable.

It also should be noticed that on the view here advanced one may know without
knowing that one knows. Skeptical tendencies are often associated with the
mistaken view that one has to know that one knows in order to know. And in
particular, one does not have to know that one actually has "an appropriate
basis in thought and experience" in order to have one, and one does not
have to know that one's representation is true in order to know. It has to be
true, indeed, but we do not have to know that it is true. We "use" it
or live it; we don't "mention" or focus upon it.

Knowing that my representation is true is quite different condition from
knowing the respective objective circumstance to be the case. When I know that
the book in my briefcase is a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, for
example, what I know is not that my representation of the book in my briefcase
as being a copy of Kant's Critique is true--though of course I might
know that too. What I know is something about that book, namely, that it is in
my briefcase. And likewise, when I know that, I may not know that I have an
"appropriate basis" for representing it as I do--though I might
know that too. It is enough that it is true, and that I do I have
an appropriate basis for representing it as I do.

Clearly, if I cannot know without knowing that I know, then I can't know that
I know without knowing that I know that I know. And so forth. This is a
genuinely vicious regress. But we often do in fact know things without knowing
that we know, and without even considering whether we know or not. Many familiar
cases could be cited.

Essential to knowledge and knowing are, then, at least truth and logical
grounding. We know only if our representations in the given case are true and
logically non-arbitrary. Essential to logical grounding are logical relations:
especially the simple formal relations of implication, consistency and
inconsistency. Noetic unity comes in because knowing and knowledge require a
larger context of consciousness involving many interrelated states and acts and
kinds of states and acts. Our question now becomes: Can truth, logical relations
and noetic unity be understood in physicalistic--and in that sense
"naturalistic" --terms? Can knowing and knowledge be accommodated
within the categories of physicalism, the narrower or "Puritanical"
Naturalism?

Truth as "Matching Up"

Truth lies at the heart of knowledge. Knowledge is a condition of the human
being that involves truth, for it involves representing its subject matter as it
is; and, as we shall also see, much of our knowledge is in the first instance
knowledge of truths.

Truth is also a vital human need, and a major part of what makes knowledge
valuable. It and its opposite, falsity, are solidly at home in the midst of
ordinary life. To know what truth is and to be able to recognize it and its
opposite are basic components of ordinary human competence. To find one's way
about, to communicate, and to give and receive directions and commands often
requires us to identify the truth values of thoughts, beliefs and statements. In
functioning in normal human relationships, say in a family or on a job, one must
be able to recognize truth in thought, belief and statement. All of us bear a
primary ethical responsibility to make sure that how we are thinking and
speaking of things is as they are, that is, that our thoughts and words are
true. Our view of the nature of truth must be compatible with its actual role in
real life. But what is truth?

We first come to know truth--and what truth is--in concrete cases of
verification within our physical environment. An infant in its second year of
life or earlier develops the ability to look for something and to recognize it--what
they are looking for--when it is found. The child at that point is capable of
sustaining a specific thought or representation of something and of sorting
objects that come before it with respect to whether they are or are not what
they are seeking. Close to the same time the "uh oh!" phenomena
emerges. The child observes things as not being how they 'should' be or
are expected to be and verbally expresses the felt incongruity or lack of
"fit." Closely linked with these developments is the ability to think
of something as being such and such, and the associated capacity to find
something to be (or to not be) as it is thought to be. This is verification
as a human reality. It is a primary form of knowing in the occurrent sense.

Soon the child learns the utility of lying, or representing things as it
knows they are not. At that point it is in position to become truthful or
honest, to routinely represent things as it knows them to be. Interestingly,
children never have to be taught to lie. At an early age they figure it out
quite on their own from their understanding of how thoughts and words do and do
not match up with what they are about. This "matching up"--primarily
of thought, and well before language is at the child's disposal--stands clearly
before the child and is an essential condition of then learning the use of the
words "true" and "false."

There is, accordingly, nothing esoteric, mysterious or enigmatic about truth
(or falsity) itself, though many particular truths have such properties
and some may even be completely unknowable. It is enigmatic or mysterious only
for those who have decided that what it is it cannot be, or who have adopted a
theory of mind (or language) and world that makes it either impossible or
inaccessible. When what our belief or statement is about is as we believe or
state it to be, when our representation or idea "matches up" to its
object in the familiar way already indicated by cases, our representation
(belief, statement) is true. Truth itself is just this characteristic of
"matching up." When it is absent our representation etc. is false.

Truth and falsity are objective properties of representations. They
are objective ways in which propositions differ and resemble among themselves,
just as colors (red, yellow, green) and sizes are objective ways in which apples
and other things differ and resemble among themselves. To say that they are
objective is to say that they do not depend upon what we may think or feel about
them. No proposition etc. can be made true merely by believing or favoring
it--by one person or a million.

Now since this is so, what we find truth (or falsity) to be in the abundant
cases where we can compare beliefs or statements (or, more properly, the
propositions they involve) to what they are about is exactly what truth is in
the cases where we do not or cannot directly compare thought with its subject
matter. This characteristic constancy is something that truth values share with
any object that, like truth, is not produced of modified by cognitive or other
attitudes toward it. For example, thoughts to the effect that a certain
candidate won an election, that the earth goes around the sun, and that Milton
in Paradise Lost really intended to glorify rebellion are cases where we
cannot directly verify or experience the truth of the thoughts by comparing them
with what they are about. This inability, however, is due to the nature of the
particular subject matter in relation to our cognitive faculties, not to the
nature of representations, truth and reality as such. The truth of a belief or
statement is not created by verification, but discovered by it.
Otherwise we could prevent a belief from being true by refusing to verify it.
Even in the cases most difficult to verify, truth remains a
"correspondence" or "matching up" of the general type we
become acquainted with in the verified cases.

For a thought or statement to be true, then, is simply for its subject matter
to be as it is represented or held to be. When we confirm that a hitherto
unconfirmed belief or statement is true, we do not create the relation
(correspondence) it actually has to what it is about, any more that we create
the fit of a wrench to a bolt head by placing the wrench on the bolt head, or
the fit of a door to a frame by setting the door in the frame. The wrench fits
the bolt head (or does not) even if it is never placed upon the bolt
head, and the door fits the frame (or does not) even if it is never placed
within it. And, similarly, a representation that is true is true even if it is
never verified--by direct comparison with its object or otherwise. Truth is not
the same thing as verification or proof, nor is it dependent for its existence
and nature upon verification, any more than the fit or
"correspondence" of the wrench to the bolt head is or is dependent
upon the juxtaposition of the wrench upon the bolt head.

Also, what truth is does not change with time or historical process. It is a
certain property or relation-like structure, and as such it is not the kind of
thing that can change, any more than grey and yellow or sister or brother
can--which is a totally different matter from how we choose to use the words
"grey," "yellow," "sister," and
"brother." When philosophers of the last two centuries have suggested
that truth--this relation-like structure of correspondence that we all become
acquainted with in our early years--is "really" the logical coherence
or practical utility of beliefs or statements, etc., their suggestion is no more
worthy of serious consideration than would be a suggestion that yellow is really
an odor or that being a sister is the same thing as being a seamstress. Those
suggestions were in fact based on the assumption that we cannot compare
beliefs and statements with what they are about--an assumption that is refuted
by the fact that everyone constantly does it.

The Naivety of "Correspondence"

But isn't this view, as commonsensible as it may seem, simply naive, simple
minded? Hasn't what we have learned about mind, phenomena, language and culture
in the last two centuries shown that we do not and cannot experience such
'truth', can never directly find the fit (or lack of fit) between
representations and what they are of or about?

To answer this question in any remotely adequate manner would require a
critical interpretation of theories of knowledge since Locke. It is, above all,
with Locke that we seriously and continuously began to develop theories of
representation (first mental and then linguistic or "symbolic")
according to which our representations actually make it impossible to see
whether our thoughts "fit" what they are about because any attempt to
do so would only yield another representation, and so on. This theory has been
the foundation for many of the major 'triumphs' over Naturalism, from Kant and
Hegel to Putnam and Derrida, as well as the root of the failure of many attempts
at a genuine realist (often confused with naturalistic) theory of knowledge. It
is also what has turned truth itself into an enigma or impossibility for many
thinkers, and has led in the last two centuries to the emergence of many well
known candidates for its office.16

Still, a few points might be usefully mentioned in response to the charge of
naivety.

First of all, the anti-correspondence, representationalist theories which now
fill up the recent philosophical past are far from coming together in an
adequate account of the mind-world relation or lack thereof. It isn't as if
there were now available some solid insight grounding an alternative to the type
of accessible correspondence described above. In fact there is no generally
acceptable alternative to correspondence. There is a series of successively
discredited theories from Locke to Hume, to Kant to Hegel (or Fichte) to
Positivism and Phenomenalism in their various forms; and then 'language' (the
"new way of words") is substituted for way of "ideas" or
"experience," and the old battles fought over again. This time about
how words tie to the world, and the outcome being a lingo-centric predicament
instead of a ego-centric predicament. One cannot easily suppose that there is a
philosophically credible alternative to the correspondence theory of truth. We
don't have "something better" on hand.

Second, it is a noteworthy historical fact that every significant philosopher
up to Kant accepted correspondence or "matching up" as the correct
account of truth, even in cases, such as Hume's, where it was inconsistent with
their overall system. Of course that does not by itself prove that that account
is correct. But it is a historical fact that calls for some explanation.

This fact is, I think, associated with another significant fact: that those
philosophers never suspected that thought was somehow linguistic, and that the
real problem of truth had to do with sentences and what we do with them.
Sentences and utterances do not, in fact, correspond to what they are about, and
whatever truth may be as a predicate of them or other linguistic items is
certainly open for speculation. What counts as a sentence (etc.) is also
obviously relative to a language, and which sentences are true or false will be
likewise. No doubt there are many interesting questions to be pursued with
reference to sentences, languages, and "truth" as a linguistic
predicate. But to suppose that a pragmatic or disquotational or rational
acceptability theory of truth, for example, has anything to do with truth as a
child comes easily to recognize it and as it is present in the constant
experience of adults is simply to mistake or try to substitute one thing for
another--of course from deep and powerful philosophical motivations.

These would surely include motivations of an empiricist or naturalistic
character. Sentences and utterances, at least, present themselves as public,
sense perceptible objects--though the "rules" governing them do not.
But a certain version of contemporary Formalism in logical theory actually
attempts to pass off the visible shape and arrangement of written symbols as
logical form.17

Third, there remains the fact that we do constantly experience the
"matching up" of thought with a subject matter we do not make or
maintain in existence. At least we are strongly impressed that we do when we are
not in the philosophical arm chair: so strongly impressed that only some very
strong philosophical impetus to the contrary could shake us. I think it is this
that explains the long dominance of the correspondence theory among
philosophers.

There are two main philosophical interpretations of consciousness that
undermine this commonsense impression and the long philosophical tradition.
One--the "Midas touch" picture of consciousness, as I call
it18--is the view that to take something as our
'object' automatically transforms it in some essential way (possibly even making
it 'mental'). How, exactly, consciousness--or for that matter language, or
culture--being what it is, could make a tree or block of ice what it is, or turn
something that was not already a tree or block of ice into one, is truly hard to
say. We actually know how trees etc. come about, and they are not made by
consciousness. One also can safely say that the story about how consciousness
supposedly does its transforming and productive work has never been
satisfactorily told. The second interpretation plays off of the saying that one cannot
escape consciousness--can't, as it is often said, "step outside of
one's mind." Certainly, to be conscious of anything one must be conscious.
But it does not follow from this that one cannot compare a thought to what it is
about and see whether it "matches up" or not. Only confusion could
make one think it does--a confusion probably based upon the "Midas
touch" picture of consciousness.

Fourth, those who reject the correspondence model of truth do still, its
seems to me, accept it, or at least its essential point, in a certain important
respect. In advancing their own theories of the relationship between mind (or
language/culture) and world they do not seem to me to suggest in any way that
the truth of those theories about that relationship is in any sense relative.
They seem to me to be telling us how things are with that relationship
regardless of how they or any other person or culture may or may not speak or
think of it. They give us the essential truth and the necessary essence of that
relationship. I believe this to be true of the extreme relativists such as Rorty
and Derrida, but also of the more modest ones such as Putnam.

Thus, Putnam states his own view that "truth and rational
acceptability--a claims being right and someone's being in a position to make
it--are relative to the sort of language we are using and the sort of context we
are in."19 But can we
imagine him to be thinking that his view of truth and rational acceptability
here expressed is relative to language and context? I believe he intends to tell
us what is the case with regard to truth and rational acceptability itself,
and what indeed cannot be otherwise. That we are always "within" a
language, he is telling us, is an essential truth that makes
"metaphysical realism" a strict and eternal impossibility. And yet he
surely is, precisely, a metaphysical realist about our being within a language.
The idea that in his discussions of language (mind) and world he is merely
reporting on how things go from within a particular language and context which
happen to be his does not seriously bother him--as surely it should if his views
of truth etc. are, shall we say, true. But that would turn his view into
something that would be of no general philosophical interest. And he does take
philosophical interest to be of great importance. That is why he wants to be a
Realist of some sort, if only an "internal" one. He can't just join up
with Rorty et. al. and treat truth as whatever can be sustained in
your context. Thus his claim that Quine allows himself a "transcendental
standpoint" in a certain respect20
actually applies to himself, if I am right, with regard to his claims about
rationality, truth, reference and allied subjects. Here he indeed does take the
"God's eye view."

Now this is by no means peculiar to Putnam, who is certainly one of the very
finest of contemporary thinkers. I think it is built into the essential function
of thought and assertion to present things as they are without regard to
their being thought of or spoken of. Thus we have to use special forms of
thought and language to express how things appear to us or are conceptualized by
us or our group. If I am right, the simple correspondence indicated above has
had the influence it has had over philosophical tradition and plays the role it
does throughout human life because that is what really lies at the juncture
between mind and world where we actually live. I believe no sound reason has
ever been given for thinking it does not.

Why Truth Can't Be "Naturalized"

Suppose, then, that truth in the sense of the matching up of representation
with subject matter lies at the heart of knowledge. Can it be captured within
the categories of the narrower Naturalism? I believe it clearly cannot. The
argument against it is an old and simple one that has been reworked in many
forms in recent decades.21

Suppose that we have an acceptable list of physical properties and
relations. We might take them from physical theory, as the properties and
relations corresponding to the concepts of current physics: location, mass,
momentum and so forth. (Who knows what the future or ultimate physics will look
like?) Or, moved by the above doubts about what philosophy can soundly derive
from the sciences, we could turn to the primary qualities of Modern philosophy,
and, for that matter, add on the secondary ones as well: color, odor, etc. I
don't think we need, for present purposes, to be very scrupulous about the list.
Let us agree that whatever goes on such a list will count as physical
properties, and that narrow Naturalism is the proposal to confine our inquiries
and conclusions to whatever shows up on the list and combinations thereof.

The argument, then, is simply that no such property or combination of
properties constitutes a representation of anything, or qualifies their
bearer as being of or about anything. The properties of those
properties and combinations thereof are not the same as the properties of
representations (ideas, thoughts, propositions, beliefs, statements). If this is
correct, and if the narrower Naturalism admits only these properties, then there
are no representations in the world of the narrower Naturalism. Truth then
disappears from that world, because in it no subject matter is represented; and
hence it can never happen that something "is as it is represented or
thought to be." With truth, knowledge also disappears. The ontological
structure of knowledge cannot be present in the world of narrower Naturalism.

Note that my claim is that such physical properties never constitute a
representation. I say nothing here about representation (mental qualities) not emerging
from the physical properties of, say, the human brain. This is not because I
think they may so emerge, although some form of interaction between them and the
brain surely does happen. Rather, it is because I can only regard talk of the
emergence of irreducibly mental

properties from the brain or the central nervous system as mere property
dualism cumapologies.22

Significantly, Hilary Putnam and Daniel Dennett, in defending their own views
of representation, belief and the intentional, emphatically support the view
that the physical is devoid of the representational. Putnam asks us to imagine
an ant crawling around in a patch of sand in such a way as to trace out "a
recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill."23
"Do the lines thus produced depict or represent Churchill?"
Putnam asks. He thinks most people would say it does not. The ant has simply
traced some lines "that we can 'see as' a picture of
Churchill." Putnam's view is that nothing (in the brain/mind or out) in
itself is a representation of anything, but is of or about (depicts or
denotes), something other than itself, if it does so, only because we
"take it" as depicting or denoting that other thing.

Dennett holds a similar view, and specifically with reference to the states
of human beings, such as beliefs, desires, etc. In the typically
"naturalistic" mode he declares his "starting point to be the
objective, materialistic, third person world of the physical sciences," and
holds "that philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the
physical sciences."24 Like
Putnam (who of course is not a Naturalist), depicting, denoting, etc. is for
Dennett only a matter of how we treat something. "The intentional
stance" or "intentional strategy," as he calls it, "consists
of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent
with beliefs and desires and other mental stages exhibiting what Brentano and
others call intentionally."25
The existence of belief, etc. with its intentionality is to be confirmed only by
the success of the intentional stance as a strategy for predicting behavior. And
when a better predictive strategy comes along, all the mental clutter of
"folk psychology" will go the way of phlogiston and witches. Of course
if that happens they aren't "really there" now.

For Dennett as for Putnam there is nothing in the brain or out that by its
nature represents something else. There are no "natural signs." There
are only human events of "taking as." And these events of "taking
as" also, it would seem, must themselves lack any natural capacity for
representation (of what is taken as). Rather they, in their turn, can
only be taken as representing what is taken as intentional states or
systems of the human organism, or what is taken as pictures or symbols. They do
not inherently represent them.

Surely there is something wrong here. If we are in a world where nothing is
naturally representative of something else, and we see the lines traced by the
ant as a picture of Winston Churchill, then our seeing also is not naturally of
the lines, and of the lines as depicting Churchill. Either there is going
to be at some point a "taking as" which does not itself represent
anything (even what is "taken")--which certainly sounds like a
self-contradiction and is at best unlike the instances of "taking"
featured in Dennet's explanations--or there is going to be an infinite regress
of "takings." This inclines one to say that unless there are some natural
signs--things that refer or represent simply because of what they are--there
will be no signs at all.26
But natural signs are, precisely, impossible in the world of strict physicalism--and,
for his own reasons, in Putnam's more generous world as well.

Logical Relations

If narrow Naturalism cannot provide for truth, it also cannot provide for
logical relations. Yet these too are essential constituents of knowledge. It
cannot provide for such relations because they are, precisely, relations with
respect to the truth values of propositions. Here we need only consider simple
cases such as the relation of contrariety. Two propositions are logical
contraries if they can both be false but cannot both be true. For example, Sue's
dress is red and Sue's dress is blue. If one of these propositions is
true, the other must be false. They cannot both be true. But both can be
false--if Sue's dress is white, for example. The relation of contradiction, by
contrast, is one that requires two propositions related by it to have opposite
truth values, whichever they may be.

These and other logical relations are, like truth itself, objective
relations. They obtain or do not obtain between propositions regardless of what
any individuals or groups may feel or think about them. Moreover, laws
expressing the logical relationships and logical character of propositions have
a different sense and character from any laws of physical or psychological fact.
They are neither hypothetical nor inductive, and have no existential import for
such facts. They remain valid whether or not any such facts obtain. This becomes
clearer if one tries to deduce or prove them from physical, psychological or
linguistic facts or laws. It is not so much that it is not, in fact, done, or
that it cannot be done, as that one cannot even imagine what it would be like to
do it.27 These are points which
Frege and Husserl elaborated so effectively in the late 19th and early 20th
Centuries that they could hardly be raised for discussion until the
philosophical turn from thought to language and culture was more or less
completed in recent decades. But I think they are points which can be made to
stand up independently of the correspondence account of truth; and, if so, they
provide a refutation of Naturalism independent of that account and resting
simply on the nature of the Laws of Logic.

But the centrality of logical relations for knowledge does not just concern
the essential involvement of logical relations with truth values. Comparatively
speaking, very little that we know we know because we are able to directly
examine the respective subject matter and verify the truth of our ideas about
it. This little is, of course, profoundly important, both in allowing us to
understand what truth is, as explained above, and in providing true premisses
from which we may proceed to other known truths by following out logical
relations. Finding truths by following out logical relations occurs to an almost
fantastic extent by the application of mathematics to various domains--and
especially now, when such application is hugely extended by means of computers.
In these cases it is knowledge of the truth of the derived propositions that
allows us to know that the corresponding state of affairs obtains and that its
constituents exist. Here logical relations plus truth of premisses allows us to
know unexperienced (and even unexperiencable) existence, rather than the
comparison of existence to thoughts about it allowing us to know truths.

Noetic Unity

As logical relations presuppose truth, so noetic unity presupposes logical
relations--and more, presupposes a pattern of simultaneous and successive
awarenesses that intercommunicates across a wide range of mental states and acts
and their objects. The noetic aspect of knowing and knowledge encompasses all of
the types of mental states and acts and their ways of coming together that are
involved in the individual coming to know or to be in a state of knowledge.
Knowledge is something that must be possessed. It is not the same thing
as theory. And the possession of knowledge is an incredibly complicated and
messy business, even with such a relatively simple part of knowing as a mere
inference.

Thus Kornblith is quite right and makes a crucial point in rejecting purely
apsychological accounts of belief (and knowledge) formation.28
These types of accounts simply overlook the noetic requirements of knowledge and
lead to what she calls "The Arguments-on-Paper Thesis," which treats
justification as merely a matter of the logical relationships between
propositions. The various forms of anti-foundationalism draw most of their
ammunition from legitimate noetic considerations, and that is their strength:
Quine's famous "web of belief," Popper's picture of inquiry as driving
piles into mud and sand just deep enough to support the bridge, Norwood Hansen's
theory-ladenness of perception, Horkheimer's distinction between
"traditional" and "critical" theory, the currently famous
"intertextuality," etc. etc.

Because the noetic issues are routinely mishandled through ontological
mistakes or confusions carried into discussions of them--usually from empiricist
or naturalistic assumptions--those who emphasize the noetic (and in a sense
the psychological or even the social) conditions of knowing and knowledge most
often turn out to be anti-realists. And one may be taken for an anti-realist
just for attempting to do justice to the noetic requirements. About a century
ago Wilhelm Wundt accused Husserl of refuting logical psychologism in the
first volume of his Logical Investigations and reverting to it in the
second volume--merely because the second volume is devoted to issues that are
essentially noetic. The opposite of Naturalism, however, is not some form of
subjectivism or idealism. Anti-Naturalism does not need to downgrade the
ontological status of the empirical world and the empirical self. We don't
surrender realism to defeat Naturalism.

Still, for all the risks, any careful practice of knowing or theoretical
examination of knowledge (and none have surpassed Husserl's) must take its
noetic dimensions into account. That is why philosophers do not write their
arguments on three by five cards and pass them around to each other, and why
even footnotes (pace Searle) are not a sign of low philosophical quality.29
Philosophers produce expository texts, as well as arguments, to express, convey
and evoke a noetic context within which actual understanding and knowing can
occur and arguments be appreciated.

Thus, in his Discourse on Method, Part II, Descartes lays out his
favored four from among "the great number of precepts of which Logic is
composed." All four are clearly noetic principles, from refusing to
'accept' whatever is unclear, to the meticulous review of the steps in the
progression from the clear and simple to the complex but logically derivable. Of
course they also presuppose truth and logical relations and an ordered awareness
thereof.

In a more recent philosophical presentation of modern logic, L. S. Stebbing
distinguishes and interrelates inference (the essential noetic structure)
and implication (the logical relation), the "therefore" and the
"if...then," as she also puts it.30
(She uses the term "epistemic" but clearly means the noetic as here
understood.) The "epistemic" conditions of coming to know q on
the basis of p, as she describes them, include: p must be known to
be true, and p must be known to imply q without its being known
that q is true. She also holds that "although p may implyq when q is false, yet q cannot be validly inferred from p
unless it is the case both that p is true and is known to be true."
She goes on to discuss the difference between inferring something
("validly"?) and tracing out the logical consequences of a proposition
not assumed to be true or even assumed to be false, as in reductio ad
absurdum. Such use of assumptions and logical relations are obviously a
crucial part of coming to possess knowledge, though they clearly are not
inferences or arguments.

Alvin Plantinga rightly notes that "foundationalism is a normative
thesis about noetic structures."31
And, of course, the same is true about the many versions of Coherentism,
Verificationism, Aufbau projects, Social Constructionism, Externalism,
Internalism, and "linguistic rule" theories that have turned up during
the last century or so.

So, can the noetic be naturalized? It clearly cannot be, because of its
pervasive involvement with logical relations. But there is more. The Kantian
theme of the "unity of apperception" turns up here. His primary focus
was upon the unity of a simple judgment and what was thereby presupposed about
the mind. That is an important topic in itself, but knowledge and knowing does
not come in the form of a simple judgement, or two or three of them. It comes in
the form of a vast "web," to borrow Quine's word, of judgments,
conceptualizations, perceptions, memories, even feelings and sensations, and
experiences of many kinds. Indeed, it is not too much to say, a web of life.
To know, we have said, is to represent something as it is, on an appropriate
basis of thought and experience. The "appropriate basis" is never just
awareness of a few logical relations, and a considerable "background"
must be in place before the simplest cases of verification--finding the broom to
be in the closet as I thought it to be--can occur.

Now, without logical relations and awareness of logical relations none of
this could exist. But everything from how rationality functions across the great
noetic web of the individual self, to the basic nature of creative genius (what was
it about Einstein, after all?), to issues of self-identity are involved in
noetic unity. This, I believe, is why it is impossible to lay down general
sufficient conditions of an "appropriate basis." And before Naturalism
can triumph it would have to provide an elucidation of noetic unity within the
framework of Physicalism specified above. This will take more than an argument
that pain is a chemical process in the brain plus a salute to the future of
brain science. We will need an "identity thesis" that reduces
Einstein's understanding of physical theory to brain states before it becomes
really interesting.

Summary

We have tried to show why Naturalism must be taken in the form of a
"Puritanical" physicalism if it is to be a philosophically significant
position, and have presented knowledge as involving at least truth as
correspondence, logical relations and noetic unity. We have argued that there is
no place for truth or logical relations in a world where the only properties are
physical, and therefore that noetic unity is also impossible in such a world.
Since it is possible--many things are known and there are people of great
knowledge--Naturalism must be false. It cannot accommodate the ontological
structure of knowing and knowledge.32

Notes

What might be called
"generic Naturalism" has a long history that includes: Classical
Naturalism, with figures such as Democritus, Epicurus, Aristotle and
Lucretius; Renaissance Naturalism, with Bruno, Campanella and Telesio,
and--born too late--Spinoza; Empiricist/Nominalist Naturalism, with Hobbes,
Hume, D'Holbach and most of the French Encyclopedists and Comte;
19th-Century Materialistic Naturalism, with Jakob Moleschott, Karl Vogt,
Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner, Herbert Spencer and, it is often presumed,
Charles Darwin; Mid-20th-Century (largely anti-Materialistic) Naturalism,
with Santayana, Dewey and others; and Late-20th-Century ("Identity
Thesis") Naturalism, which wavers between Scientism and Physicalism,
with Quine, David Armstrong, Paul and Patricia Churchland, John Searle, etc.

To appreciate contemporary
Naturalism for what it is, and the logical nuances that surround it, one has to
see it in this long historical context. The single unifying theme of all
Naturalisms is anti-transcendentalism. Their steady point of reference is
the visible world and whatever it contains, which is "Nature" in
extension. Nothing "outside" it is to be allowed. This visible world
is held to be self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating and self
directing. Usually though not always it is thought to consist entirely of
processes involving only blind force. But what "Nature" is in
intension has never been agreed upon among Naturalists. Some look very much like
Pantheists, and yet others (Santyana, Dewey) reach very far to incorporate
"the divine" and all that is humanly unique into "Nature."
(See, currently, the divergence between Searle and, e.g., Paul Churchland or
Daniel Dennett on the nature of the the mental.) Thus "self" in
"self-existent" etc. only has the negative meaning of
"non-other," i.e., not in virtue of something separate from this thing
called "Nature."

Effective entry into the long
story for use by a contemporary thinker can be gained by starting with the
article by James Ward, "Naturalism," in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 10th edition, vol XXXI, p. 88, and then going on to his Naturalism
and Agnosticism, (London: A & C Black, Limited, 1915). W. R. Sorley's The
Ethics of Naturalism (London; William Blackwood and Sons, 1904), especially
pp. 17-21, is also helpful in understanding how Naturalism has tried to distance
itself from Materialistic Naturalism of Vogt, Haeckel, Büchner, etc. A series
of articles on Naturalism in The Journal of Philosophy from 1945 through
1949, easily identifiable by their titles, was evoked by the appearance of Naturalism
and the Human Spirit, [Yervant H. Krikorian, ed., (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1944)] and by A. E. Murphey's excellent critical review of it
in that Journal [42 (1945): 400-417]. The outcome of the mid-20th Century
discussion is nicely summarized by Arthur Danto's article,
"Naturalism," in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967), pp. 448-430. One of the
intriguing aspects of the current situation is how Materialism, which was
thought to be dead or something to be avoided for the first half of the 20th
Century, came to life again in association with the "identity thesis"
of mind and body and a new Scientism, and led to a reformulation and resurgence
of Naturalism at the end of the 20th Century. Reading Danto's fine article you
would never have thought it possible.

See Jaegwon Kim, "What is 'Naturalized
Epistemology'?" in Kornblith, ed., Naturalizing Epistemology,
pp. 33-55; and Hilary Putnam's two Howison lectures, published in his Realism
and Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapters 12
and 13, under the titles "Why There Isn't a Ready-Made World" and
"Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized." Return
to text.

See the Chapter "The Construction of Good," in
Dewey's The Quest for Certainty, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1960) or most any of Dewey's mature works, such as Human Nature and
Conduct, (New York: The Modern Library, 1922) or, perhaps best of all, Experience
and Nature, (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1958). On norms in
nature see also Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 72, and the thorough discussion in
his Warrant and Proper Function, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), Chapter 11. Return to text.

John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind,
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 85. Return
to text.

A. E. Murphey, "Book Review of Naturalism and the
Human Spirit," The Journal of Philosophy, 42 (1945),
400-417, p. 417. This may be the deeper reason why there is now a widespread
sense that, in the words of Michael Friedman, Naturalism "has reached
the end of its useful life." See his thorough examination of the
current situation regarding Naturalism in his Presidential Address to the
American Philosophical Association: "Philosophical Naturalism," Proceedings
and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 71 (1997):
7-37, as well as Barry Stroud's Presidential Address of the previous year,
"The Charm of Naturalism," [Proceedings and Addresses etc.,
70 (1996): 43-55], which emphasizes the lack of anything approaching a
consensus concerning the meaning of the term. The volume Naturalism: A
Critical Appraisal, Steven Wagner and Richard Warner, edd., (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993) also demonstrates what hard days
have now befallen the movement. Return
to text.

One can also retreat to agnosticism, as seems to have
happened with Thomas Huxley and others in the late 1900s. See the article,
"Naturalism," in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion
and Ethics, IX, (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, n.d.), pp. 195-198.
Also James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism. Agnosticism about matter
has begun to re-emerge in the philosophy of mind in recent years. Return
to text.

For a quick introduction see the article "Knowledge
and Belief," by Steven Luper-Foy, in A Companion to Epistemology,
Johathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, edd., (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993),
pp. 234-337. Unfortunately, John Cook Wilson is not discussed there. Return
to text.

Roy Wood Sellars says that "knowledge is the
possession of ideas which do disclose the characteristics of the
object denoted. In knowing we hold ourselves to grasp the nature of the
object, its properties, characteristics.... Knowledge is the disclosure of
the characteristics of existence." Roy Wood Sellars, The Philosophy
of Physical Realism, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), p. 106.
The entire Chapter IX, "Knowing a Common World," should be
read. Return to text.

First Hegel and Kierkegaard, then Pragmatism and
Coherence, then several 20th Century options parasitical upon language
(verifiability, rational acceptability, disquotational theories, and so
forth). Loosening the grip on truth as an objective structure quickly led to
loss of an objective and imperious logic. See the ways Hume, Kant, Hegel and
Mill abuse the idea of logic, and for later developments up to the present
see my "The Degradation of Logical Form," Xiomathes (1997):
31-52. Return to text.

See my "Space, Color,
Sense Perception and the Epistemology of Logic," The Monist, 72
(1989): 117-133, for a critical discussion of this idea.

With respect to the linguistic
nature of thought, Dennett remarks: "So the argument for a language of
thought comes down to this: What else could it be?" [Daniel C. Dennett, The
Intentional Stance, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 35 and see the
footnote on this page.] Well, there are some interesting possibilities as to
what thought apart from language might be, well known in the history of thought,
if one can but for a moment escape the grasp of empiricistic Naturalism. Return
to text.

See my "Predication as Originary
Violence: A Phenomenological Critique of Derrida's View of Intentionality,"
in Working through Derrida, Gary B. Madison, ed., (Evanston IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 120-136. Return
to text.

In the last chapter of his The Intentional Stance,
Dennett gives a very helpful presentation of the issues in recent these
discussions, from the discussions between Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid
Sellars to the time of the writing of his book in 1987. Return
to text.

Searle's position is the clearest case of this. See The
Rediscovery of Mind, and the more recent collection of papers, The
Mystery of Consciousness, (New York: The New York Review of Books,
1997). I do believe that emergence can be employed as a valid and useful
concept in numerous domains, e.g., chemistry, sociology and the arts. But
its valid employment requires some degree of insight into why this
emerges from that. Such insight is lacking in the case of the brain
and thoughts. This is a basic point made by such authors as Thomas Nagel and
Colin McGinn. Searle's "simple solution" to "the famous
mind-body problem," which "in a sense, we all know...to be
true" simply refuses to face up to this fact. (Rediscovery, p.
1) Rightly insisting on the irreducibility of mental properties, Searle
tries to force them to be natural by assigning them a role in evolutionary
theory and claiming that they in some literal sense are present in or on the
brain. As to the former point, even Descartes' could have recognized the
function of his mental qualities in survival. Of course he did not think
they 'emerged' from the brain. But neither Searle or anyone else has given
any sense to the claim that they come from or are in or upon the brain. The
actual relationship remains totally obscure. Return
to text.

This is the thesis developed in Laird Addis, Natural
Signs, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), especially
"Part Two." Return to text.

For development of this point with special reference to
Quine, see my "The Case against Quine's Case for Psychologism," in
Perspectives on Psychologism, M. A. Notturno, ed., (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1989), pp. 286-295. And see the lengthy discussion of Psychologism
and the Laws of Logic in my Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge,
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984), pp. 143-166. Return
to text.

Hilary Kornblith, "Beyond Foundationalism and the
Coherence Theory," in Naturalizing Epistemology, p. 133. She
seems unaware that she is dealing with issues that were thoroughly worked
out a couple of times during in the last one hundred years. See my Logic
and the Objectivity of Knowledge, pp. 143-166. Return
to text.

See Searle's remark to the effect that
"philosophical quality varies inversely with the number of
bibliographical references, and that no great work of philosophy ever
contained a lot of footnotes," In The Rediscovery of Mind, p.
xiv. Return to text.

For an account that covers much the same ground as this
paper, but from within the framework and terminology of Husserl's strongly
realist account of knowledge, see my paper, "Knowledge," in The
Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith,
edd., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 138-167. Return
to text.